Butler opened up about his struggles with depression in a new interview with Classic Rock Magazine, openly discussing the self-mutilation he resorted to as a younger man. "I used to be a cutter," he admitted. "I'd cut my arms, stick pins in my fingers, that kind of thing. I used to get really depressed and it was the only thing that could bring me out from it."

As he's said in the past, early Sabbath tracks couldn't help but be colored by Butler's mental state at the time. The primary lyricist for the band, Butler used his work as an outlet — as with "Paranoid," of which he said in a 2013 interview, "Basically, it's just about depression, because I didn't really know the difference between depression and paranoia. It's a drug thing; when you're smoking a joint you get totally paranoid about people, you can't relate to people. There's that crossover between the paranoia you get when you're smoking dope and the depression afterwards."

And while the group's early hit records had an obvious impact on Butler's lifestyle, he now insists Sabbath's success helped give him the lift he needed to overcome that depression. "If Sabbath hadn't made it, I'd have been long dead," he told the magazine. "I'd have killed myself."